Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. Joanne: And today, our poet, William Shakespeare, needs no introduction. We will be reading his Sonnet 116. Abram, would you please read this poem for us? Abram: This is Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. [To read this amazing sonnet, go here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds] Awesome. Joanne: Yeah. It is awesome. Abram: This poem is fantastic. I love this poem. Joanne: I have taught this poem so many times and every time it is as exciting as it was the first time I read it. Abram: Oh, it's just so great. Joanne: Yes. Yeah. Broadly speaking, this is a sonnet that is making an argument for a love that is constant and enduring and no matter what it encounters, no matter what obstacles are there, love is going to conquer those obstacles because it is so profound, it is so magnificent, right? So it's setting up a definition of love based on that constancy. Abram: So just to make sure that all of our listeners are on the same page about what is actually happening in this poem, I think maybe we should walk through it line by line so that everybody can see what images he's using and what the words actually mean that he's, that he's using here. Joanne: Yes, of course. Abram: So a lot of this makes straight up sense, right? So “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”. Impediments are things that get in the way of things, right? So, let me not, you know, admit these impediments to the marriage of true minds. Let me not stand in the way of that. “Love is not love / Which alters when an alteration finds / Or bends with the remover to remove”. I think the only possibly confusing part about that is, what is this remover? So anything that's starting to change and remove things from this relationship, if love bends with those removers, that is, gives its weight to that remover and helps in the removing, then it's not actually true love. And that takes us perfectly into the second quatrain. That is the second four line group of rhymes here. “O no! it is an ever-fixed mark”. There's some disagreement about what the mark is, but one interpretation of that is sort of like a beacon, a sea mark that is like a lighthouse “That looks on tempests and is never shaken”. So you think the storms are happening all around, but that flame in that lighthouse is steady. It's constant. It's faithful. It's not going out. It's just staring down these storms and it's the way to find our own way home. Right? So it looks on tempests and it's never shaken. Then we move from that mark to the star. Some people see the mark in the star as the same. Some people see the mark as a lighthouse. So it could be the same image or a separate image, but now we have, “It is the star to every wandering bark”. That is, if you're navigating your way with the stars, there's one star, the pole star, the north star that never moves, right? It is every star. Always steady. It's always there. It's in the same spot in the same sky every night. And it's the way we're going to find our way home again, right? So whatever else changes, that does not change. And it guides us. “Whose worth's unknown,”. That is, the worth of this star is such that you could never fully measure it. It is beyond knowing. It is so manifold, so full that even when we think, Oh, we know the worth of that star. We don't know the worth of that star, right? It's worth is immeasurable. “Although his height be taken”. We use that height, that measurement in order to guide this wandering bark. So the height can be taken and still the worth of the star can be unknown. Is that an accurate read? Is that about how you see this quatrain working? Joanne: Yes. Yeah. And I think about, you know, I've been enjoying the photographs from the James Webb telescope that just went up a few weeks ago and I marvel at how much more we know about stars and planets today compared to 400 years ago, and yet how much more is yet to be discovered. So I think that's sort of what that metaphor is meant to do for us is to remind us that even if we try to measure and define and be guided by that star, it's still not entirely knowable. Abram: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. And one of the paradoxes at play in this poem is that if love is perfect it can't change because (and this is ancient, ancient philosophical thought), if something is perfect, any change to perfection introduces an imperfection. And so one of the questions of this poem is how can a perfect love be perfect if it never changes, that is, wouldn't you want love to kind of grow. Something about love needs to be dynamic to be perfect, and yet a perfect love, if it changes, if it alters with alteration, if it removes with remover, the poet is saying, that's actually not perfect love, that's imperfect love. So that takes us to the third quatrain, “Love's not time's fool”. What do you see happening? What's the basic meaning here of this, this quatrain? Joanne: So if we look at the whole quatrain, “Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come”. So that sentence interests me because it's basically saying “Love is not the fool of time”. So fool could mean a fool or a jester. Love is not subservient to time. Love is not just there as a trifle or an entertainment. But then the poet concedes, “though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come”. So there's a concession there, where the poet is saying, “Well, love may not be time's fool, but, time (which is figured here as the grim reaper), our rosy lips and cheeks, sort of, we associate those with youth, they will fade”, right? We do age, we do change physically, even if our hearts and minds remain constant, right? And then it says, “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out, even to the edge of doom”. Okay, so love doesn't change just because time changes. But it endures even to the edge of doom, even when we're on the precipice of death, love will be there. Right? That's amazing. Abram: And then we come to the final couplet. “If this be error, and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved”. What do you have to say about the couplet at the end? Joanne: So this is typically in an English or Shakespearean sonnet. We call this the volta or the turn, right? The final two lines. And there's a lot of pressure on these last lines because they're both rhyming together and they're creating either a moment of insight or a truth claim or surprise. I love this sentence because it creates an if-then kind of logic. Shakespeare's not the only one who did that kind of thing, but it's important for this because everything in the poem leads up to this moment. He's basically saying, “if I've made a mistake and you can confirm I've made a mistake, then I've never written and no man has ever loved”, which of course isn't true because this is the 116th sonnet out of 154. So we know he's been busy. So yes, he's written and yes, men have loved. So we know he's really bolstering his claim with his confidence in his writerly abilities and his faith that people have fallen in love. Abram: If, if you disagree with me on this, you disagree that I even exist. Joanne: Like he's going to drop the mic and walk off the stage after this, because he knows that what he says is true. That's not possible. Abram: Right. I love the sonnet. And I often read this sonnet the way a lot of people read this sonnet as a sonnet that stands alone on its own. It’s a sort of generalized definition of true love. But that sort of definitional reading of the sonnet comes under some pressure when we start to think about the context of the sonnet, right? So who is this poet talking to? Where is this poem located in the series of sonnets that Shakespeare has written? So can you say a little bit more about where we actually find this sonnet and what else is possibly going on in it? Joanne: Shakespeare published his collection of 154 sonnets and it also included a long narrative poem at the end called The Lover's Complaint. He published this collection in 1609. Now that's interesting for a lot of reasons, one of which is, on this podcast we've talked about the quote-unquote sonnet craze of the late 1500s where basically every young man who had access to ink and paper was creating a sonnet or a sonnet sequence, right? And so Shakespeare, he is publishing this work at the tail end of that phenomenon and was trying to still innovate in his own unique way. The second thing to consider is that there's a lot we don't know about the poetic speaker in these poems and the object of desire that he's addressing. So it's very clear from some of the poems that the poetic speaker is addressing a woman. It's also clear that he's sometimes addressing a young man. When he addresses the young man in many of the sonnets in this sequence, he's saying to the young man, “You are so beautiful. You are so charismatic. When you walk into the room, you are like Beyonce. Like everyone wants to look at you. Men and women just want to stare at you and be with you. That's how beautiful you are, young man. I can't marry you. I, male poetic speaker, can't marry you in the world that we live in. So I want you to go marry a young woman and make babies that look like you so that your beauty can continue in the world”. So it's a very interesting kind of logic, but it clearly creates a situation where we feel the homoerotic desire between a male poetic speaker and the young man. We can't necessarily read Shakespeare's sonnets for a clear, cohesive narrative. I think that would be a mistake. However, you can see through lines and recurrent obsessions in the sonnets. You can see concerns with literary immortality, the transient nature of the things of this world, concerns with eros and desire and death, right? In the publication history of these sonnets, I think it's really important to keep in mind that editors have tried to straighten these sonnets in the past. So, for example, after Shakespeare's death, there was a major edition of these poems that was published in 1640. This editor Benson, George Benson, he kind of elided some of the homoerotic throughlines that were in this sonnet sequence. He cut some of them and rearranged some of them and created sort of double sonnets that would make it seem like all of the sonnets were addressed to a woman. And so there was a way in which some of that homoeroticism sort of vanished for a while through a number of additions, and it was only again in the 20th century that we started to talk about the importance of that young man as an object of desire in these sonnets. Abram: That's great. That's really important context and we need to begin to think about how does that actually affect this sonnet when we come to this sonnet because there still is so much language of marriage and true love in this sonnet. And just to give a quick sense of how we know we're sort of seemingly at a marriage ceremony or at least talking about marriage, we of course have that word marriage in the first line. “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”, but that word impediments also clues us in because these were the words that were read at the marriage ceremony. “I require and charge you (this is the priest who would read this) I require and charge you as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you do any impediment, why you may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, that ye confess it”. And so there's all this language of marriage here, but that also can be used to kind of resituate who is exactly speaking to whom. Joanne: The first command of this poem tells you everything you need to know. You and I have some different ideas about this poem. My interpretation is this: it says, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”. I'm not going to be the one to admit obstacles or problems. I'm not going to be the one to object to this. Okay? Now, the reason that interests me is that this is still true in some religious traditions, this notion of the bans of marriage. perhaps some listeners have been to a marriage ceremony where the person who's officiating the ceremony actually asks the people who are present “Is there anybody here who objects to what's about to happen?” It's a very profound moment and dramatic too. And so when I read this poem, I imagine the poetic speaker as the one who's in love with the young man who's about to be married, you know, and I imagine the poetic speaker thinking, “let me just hope that the love that's about to be sanctified here is as constant as what I'm about to describe”. And this is a very painful sonnet for me, because there is no way in 1609 that this male poetic speaker could have married the man he loved, you see? And so when he sees the young man marrying a woman, there's a bitterness to it. There's a resignation to it. He knows that the ceremony will continue, you know? Abram: You know, one thing for listeners to note is that you can have two readings of a poem, and they can both be true. This is a beautiful description of love that kind of looks forward to a moment way down the road when everything has changed, when your youth has passed, and despite all those changes, the love has remained steady and steadfast all your life. Joanne: Yeah, I mean, it looks ahead to old age, Abram, but it also looks to death. I'm waiting for the hot dog cart at the wedding and I'm waiting for them to start playing the beats at the reception, and this guy is talking about the grim reaper and the edge of doom. I'm just saying it's a bit grim. Abram: It's more than fleeting is what I will say. One other thing to make sure our listeners can note here about some of the ways the language is actually working and how it might affect the interpretation of this poem, for being kind of certain and a feeling sort of like a certain assured proclamation of a definition of love, for all that, there are a lot of negatives in this poem. And by negatives, I mean denials, reversals, turns. So if you just look at how often this poet is saying, no, it's not this, it's never that, no, no, no. These words get repeated all through the poem. Love is not love. Oh no. You know? And so there is a way in which we need to account for the fact that rather than just being an all out positive assertion, this is what love is, there's a lot of saying what love is not in this poem. Joanne: Even in the choices that Shakespeare is making at the level of just words, you can see some of that changeability. So for a poem that is arguing for the constancy of love, a lot of his language is changeable. Now this is not my idea. I want to give credit to Colin Burrow. He is my favorite editor of Shakespeare sonnets. And in his notes, he observes that Shakespeare is changing forms of words in order to argue for constancy. So for example, look at this, “love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove”. Look what he does with alters and alteration and remover and remove. He's changing the versions of the words to make an argument about constancy, which is kind of funny to me. And I think, again, it destabilizes this constant theme that he's trying to go for, at least for me as a reader, you know? Abram: Yeah and one other thing that actually does return to constancy, though we can't notice it in our modern English, is that these rhymes are true rhymes. So the way we read it now, love does not rhyme with remove, come does not rhyme with doom, proved and loved do not rhyme. So a person might be tempted to say, “Oh, he's put a bunch of slant rhymes in here, (things that look like rhymes, but aren't) in order to kind of build a kind of tension into his definition”. But in point of fact, in Shakespeare's day, these would have been true rhymes. They would have sounded the same. And the reason they don't is because of the great vowel shift. And we actually happen to have an expert with us to describe exactly what is the great vowel shift. So my beloved spouse, Kristen Van Engen, is a professor of linguistics and psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. And she actually happens to be with us (with our three year old child as well) to describe what is the great vowel shift. Kristen: So, in the late Middle English period, the vowel system of English underwent a really dramatic change where sounds that had been articulated in one place moved around. So what happens in these cases is when one sound moves, it pushes another one. But the idea is that a sound like eh moved up toward ee, and that gets in the way of ee, so then ee shifts. And in this case, what happened was the vowel that had been pronounced ee swooped down and started low and became the diphthong aye. Those are front vowels. In the back of the mouth you had oo, swooped down and turned into ow and that happened because oh was pushing up into oo. So prove would have been more like an oh sound. And it moved up to the oo. And then when it bumped into oo, the things that had been oo became ows. So the whole system pushed around and it made a really dramatic change in the language because the word that we now pronounce bite was bee-tuh and then became something like bite and made it way all the way down to bite. Or the word that you know boot was more like bolt and then it moved up to that ooh position. Joanne: So that's great because it helps us hear what we're saying the poem in a contemporary context, we say love and remove, but it would be a little bit more like love and remove and chakes and wakes instead of cheeks and weeks, instead of come and doom, it would be more like com and dom, and instead of proved and loved, it would be a little bit more like pruhved and luhved. Abram: Yes. Joanne: So maybe not exact rhymes. I mean, there's a little bit of a difference there, but you can hear that it would have had a very different kind of aural landscape in the Renaissance. Abram: Right. And I think that's important to note because it is not beyond Shakespeare to deal with slant rhymes and to play with where the turn comes in a poem, to play with all kinds of things, but he's not doing that. This is actually, in many ways, a very perfect Shakespearean sonnet. By which I mean to say there are three quatrains and then a turn to the couplet. And that's not always the case with Shakespearean sonnets, but in this case it is, and all the rhymes are true and everything is sort of coming home and twinning off. And I think that's part of the effect of saying with a kind of certainty and assurance, this steadfastness, this is true love. Joanne: Sometimes we hear rhyme and we don't think about how active it is. And we don't think about how it contributes to the drama of the poem, but this time it does, right? So if com and dom sounded similar in the Renaissance, that means that readers from that time would have been hearing that bending sickles compass com. So it's important to keep in mind that this is very much an agrarian poem that is alluding to the sickle of the grim reaper. And you know, I say sickle and maybe, you know, listeners can just visualize that an old agrarian tool that people would use, in pre industrial times to harvest wheat and it was just a long curved blade and in order to use it you had to swing your arm very rhythmically from one side to the next until you harvested all the wheat. It was very labor intensive but it was also very effective and you got all the sheaths of wheat. That's why it's such a powerful image for the Grim Reaper. Because he's coming for all of us. And it doesn't matter who you are, that's the one thing we all have in common. And so that sickle is a very sinister, sort of terrifying image. So when it says, “Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle's compass come”, oh my god, it's terrifying. Yeah. And “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom”. That compass coming and that doom, that rhyme is very, very important. So these are ways that, when we hear iambic pentameter, sometimes we just think of this very monotonous drum beat of the thumb, the thumb, the thumb, the thumb, the thumb. But that drum beat, there's all kinds of ways that poets are creating variety and excitement, sometimes with the rhythm and sometimes with the sound. Abram: So maybe with that said, we should wrap up here by thinking about all the different ways of reading this poem, thinking about it as a definition of true love or response to a sort of bitterness, a bitter sort of moment of watching the man you have loved marry someone else. Would you be willing to read it again? Joanne: Yes. [Poem] Abram: For more information about William Shakespeare's sonnets, please visit our website at poetryforall.fireside.fm. Joanne: And you can subscribe to Poetry for All wherever you get your podcasts. And please be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Abram: Thank you for listening.